What is HI Capacity?

We’re transforming dreamers into doers.

The video above shows HI Capacity’s humble beginnings. Even though we have moved to a new space, the goal of HI Capacity remains unchanged. Listen to co-founders Matthew Badeau, Austen Ito, and Jason Axelson talk about what HI Capacity is and what they hope HI Capacity accomplishes.

We’ve been meeting a lot of people in the community over the past few weeks. Whether it was at the Hawaii Geek Meet, or our first/second electronic Arduino night, we often hear people asking what exactly is a Hackerspace? We know the name sounds extremely intimidating — shoot, it even intimidates us at times! We wanted to clear up the confusion on what exactly we are and what we’re trying to do on Oahu.

If you search on Google, a Hackerspace is often defined as

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. (from http://hackerspaces.org)

While you typically need some type of critical mass to get a physical space, for the past few months, we’ve been primarily focused on organizing the local communities. Initially, we focused on electronics, but we’ve quickly realized that there’s no reason to be so specialized. We’re branching out, reaching out to those passionate about fostering an environment that creates value, and forming “Community Nights”.

So what is a Community Night?

A Community Night is a meetup organized around a particular community group. So far, we’ve managed to find organizers for the following Community Nights (and we would <3 more):

Electronic hacking night with Arduino

Programming night

Homebrew night

Design night

We’re currently in the process of trying to form a Photography night, Craft night, and hopefully, a Cooking night. Why Community Nights? We want to help get those that are passionate about a topic in front of those that want to learn. We want to help reduce the friction!

At HI Capacity, we’re focusing on three things:

We’re actively seeking a physical space to help create an environment that fosters making things.

We want to provide education to the community and raise the awareness of all these topics in the local community.

We want to be self-sustainable

If you’re passionate about a subject and would love to help organize a Community Night, we’re always looking for you.

Please get in touch with us at (maker [at] hicapacity [dot] org)!

We want to raise the bar and level of knowledge here in the islands. What better way than to teach and connect like-minded people who share the same passion?